Celebrating SIP's 10th Birthday (Part 1)

January 30, 2006

It is hard to believe, but SIP is now a 10 year-old protocol.
It's actually quite odd how some media outlets continue to refer to SIP
as an "emerging" protocol given its age. It might be due in part to the
enormous hype that has always surrounded the protocol. More than
likely, it is simply that there has been little else to talk about,
given that the telecom industry has remained in a slump for so many
years.

Even with a lot of focus on the idea of a Next Generation Network,
most of what 3GPP and the ITU have defined thus far has been
nothing more than a formalized definition of interfaces and functions
that use the SIP protocol. So, what's really "next" about NGN? What
services are not available already?

Whatever the case, SIP is getting older, and implementations are
now rolling out into the mainstream markets. Companies like Vonage
and Packet8 have adopted SIP as the foundation for the services
they offer to consumers. While these services have been relatively
successful, one cannot help but think back to the late 1990's when SIP
was on everybody's mind and great promises of "new kinds of services"
were made. In those days, existing service providers were promised
significantly lower costs, new service providers were promised the
ability to deliver a host of new services that were never possible
before, and everybody was promised a rapid service creation environment
that would allow new services to be added to the network in a flash.

So, what happened?

It is now 2006, and carriers are still, by and large, offering the same
basic voice services of yesterday. Only a handful of service providers
are offering video, and we have not seen any new service providers
rapidly turning out new kinds of services. {Ed - My VoIP service really
has not changed in more than 2 years. }

There are a number of reasons one might give as to why SIP has, to this
point, failed to live up to the hype that propelled it in the late
1990's and sustained it through the first half of this decade.